Without an ounce of shame I asked one of the most basic/ignorant questions about chips to one of the most knowledgable people in the world: How do we get from sand to a ChatGPT answer?

New episode of Uncapped with the founder of Cerebras @andrewdfeldman and my partner @ericvishria. We talked about the company's winding road to success, the market around chips, the current state future of the AI supply chain, the role of investors and Eric's relationship with the company, and more. This was one of my favorites, hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:07) Why Andrew started Cerebras in 2016 (2:54) Eric on investing without experience in chips (4:10) Attacking Goliath (9:44) Near-death experiences and the valley of death (10:44) 18 months of "still can't make it" (12:16) Solving a 75-year-old compute problem (13:26) What comes after wafer scale (16:19) The chip supply chain explained (22:30) Why the US punted a strategic industry (25:51) How to be a good hardware board member (27:50) Hardware vs. software investing (29:05) The pivot from training to inference (27:00) Specialization vs. flexibility (35:22) Building effective teams for chips (39:14) External relationships and TSMC (42:20) The AI infrastructure buildout (44:12) The data center supply chain (53:14) Speed creates markets (54:10) Disaggregation with AMD and AWS (55:24) What actually makes Nvidia great (57:30) Near-death experiences (59:58) Andrew's childhood next to William Shockley

Loved having Brian Singerman @briansin on Uncapped. We talked about his time at Founders Fund, his strategies for identifying outlier people, what type of VCs he believes are best set up for success, what he's doing with GPx, and a bunch more. He's an extremely clear thinker and it's easy to see how he helped create some of the best performing funds in our industry. Was really fun to talk with him about he did the job and what he's looking for as he backs VCs now. (0:00) Intro (0:50) Why you can't have a checklist for founders (1:46) How Brian looks for spikes (3:55) How Founders Fund played to its strengths (6:54) The Anduril founding team (12:04) The foundation of company culture (14:12) How Brian spent time with founders (19:06) What Brian is genuinely best at (20:25) GPx: backing elite emerging managers (23:12) Why Brian knew he was done with traditional VC (25:30) "I'm looking for people who could have beaten me in my prime" (29:38) GPx's structure and the bet-your-career mechanism (30:40) The optimal LP allocation to venture (34:49) Why SPVs are dead (41:00) How Founders Fund made the second most money on Airbnb (43:51) The concentration strategy (49:10) How Founders Fund worked and Peter's role (52:16) What makes Peter Thiel the best venture capitalist in history (56:53) Solo GPs vs. teams (58:02) Brian's music studio

One of the most important things to know about this AI cycle is that no one knows what they're talking and even very smart and plugged in people are continually reversing their opinions and then re-reversing them three months later.

A counterintuitive thing about the AI cycle is how things that you'd think should kill startups keep turning out to be tailwinds. Labs are good at code -> Cursor, Cog, Lovable, etc Labs are security gods -> security cos crush Frontier beats OSS -> inference startups go nuts Etc

Sam makes the case for why startups should invest much more time and capital into brand, and lays out what he's doing at Monaco. Demand gen is always easier to justify, but a lot of the software companies I respect most like Rippling, Ramp, Figma etc have clearly prioritized it.

Something Sam learned with Parker Conrad is the importance of creating a demand-rich GTM environment. When you don't have enough leads, every deal is too precious, so targets can be easily be missed and more importantly reps might try to close bad-fit deals.

I sat down with @samdblond, founder of Monaco, to talk about to talk about the future of sales and GTM in the AI era. He's an incredible GTM leader and founder and I get new ideas every time I talk to him. Hope you enjoy. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (1:26) Sam's sales journey (3:11) EchoSign learnings (5:28) Building Zenefits GTM (7:02) Parker's 0 to $10M thought exercise (9:51) Creating a demand-rich environment (14:20) People, brand, and revenue ops (21:19) Why Sam went to Founders Fund (28:00) Starting Monaco (29:40) Salesforce’s innovator's dilemma (31:40) Going straight for the system of record (34:30) Disrupting labor (41:10) Pricing in an AI-native environment (44:28) The Monaco GTM playbook (50:06) The $60,000 plane experiment (54:21) Creative campaigns vs. paid advertising (1:00:06) Monaco’s product approach (1:03:13) Advice for founders just starting to sell (1:07:58) Abundant pipeline and the right to say no

YC still produces great companies at such a high rate that I think it has to somehow be causal. They obviously have great pattern matching and pick well too, but I think the only way to have such a high hit rate from such early stage companies must be that it changes the odds.

Mercor grew from $1M to $2B in ARR in 24 months. This is the fastest growth trajectory in history. While everyone knows about AI lab investments in the Task Economy, our fastest-growing segment is Enterprise.

We had a very sobering conversation around chip fabrication vis a vis China and Taiwan. Trae talked about how America does great work around chip design, which is the (relatively) easier part of the problem, but how the fabrication lives elsewhere and why that's a problem.

"I am very uncomfortable, I am not enjoying this moment at all...we're getting back to this point where prices are untethered from reality and it reminds me a lot of 2021." Trae and FF have been among the best hard tech investors in the business, so it was interesting to hear him say that hard tech may be in an even more exuberant moment than AI.

New episode of Uncapped with @traestephens and @zebulgar from Founders Fund, and my partner @EverettRandle. We talked about Founders Fund, the role of VCs, operating versus investing, their current views on the market, and dynamics in the AI supply chain and China. The conversation stayed almost entirely on the rails and as always I learned a bunch from the way they think. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:54) What makes FF unique (8:01) Why lacking EQ can be an asset (12:10) Delian on working with Keith (18:30) Why Trae hates board meetings (24:13) Benchmark vs. Founders Fund (26:31) Investing as the exhaust of operating (28:52) Venture as a micro asset class (30:42) The infamous 2021 offsite (34:21) Current market sentiment (39:18) Can you beat the S&P? (48:53) America's semiconductor blind spot (51:56) Taiwan and the 90% probability (57:58) Robotics, humanoids, and the China question